I think with Windows you probably are the customer and the product

Cory Doctorow had an essay about that years ago, except he didn't artificially limit it to Windows:

"Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product: Incentives matter, but impunity matters more."

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar...

With Linux you can control up to the detail any auto-update, and any update in general, all the way to being able to inspect the code.

With GNU/Linux, yes. With Android/Linux, not so much. [1]

(I used to dislike this "GNU/Linux" term, it seemed unimportant - Android showed me why the GNU part of it is)

[1] https://keepandroidopen.org/

I don't think anybody implied or thought of Android in this subthread, just because it nominally runs the Linux kernel. I for sure understood it as just "Linux = whole OS-level distros of the laptop/PC bound type" not "anything with a Linux kernel even if it's a proprietary mobile phone OS".

Only if you have the closed-source Google Play Services... Just like desktop, there are plenty of Android distros like LineageOS

Why is nobody building a paid for browser with built in search engine and LLM assistant? Should probably make it open source for transparency. And before anyone says you would build/compile it yourself if it was open source, those ppl are already running their self compiled tools and are not the target market.

Isn't that essentially Dia? (Pro is 20USD/month.) https://www.diabrowser.com/

(I miss Arc, such a shame it only gets security/chromium updates now ...)

And I think Codex's desktop client has a built-in browser now? At least I've seen someone using something like that. Nevermind Atlas is a thing now too. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

(Tell me if I'm misunderstanding you?)

Who would pay for it when literally every other option has been free for a lifetime?

You are still the product with commercial OSes. Paying doesn't stop them from shoving ads and telemetry wherever they can.

Man, this is a dumb take even by HN standards.

No, the dumb take is believing that if you pay for something you are not the product anyway.

I definitely feel less a product on macOS than anything Google-orientated. I don't know where Windows fits into that exactly, given "paying for Windows" is not really how it's even seen, given major updates were 'free' (with extra ads).

He meant the face-value of your comment is dumb.

But I think it as sarcasm is also wrong.